Author Interview: Craig Shirley on 'December 1941: 31 Days that Changed America and Saved the World'

Memorial Day weekend seems an appropriate time to revisit Craig Shirley's 2011 book, December 1941: 31 Days that Changed America and Saved the World.

Shirley spoke about his book at the Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville earlier this year. After his presentation, I asked the author about the genesis of the book and what he learned while researching the history of the early days of World War II in the United States.

Craig Shirley

The idea for writing the book came from his family, he said.

When he was growing up in upstate New York, around the dining room table he heard “the stories about all the things that were going on with the Victory Gardens and the oleo[margarine] and the fake coffee and food shortages and all the sacrifices the American civilians made” during the war.

Moreover, he explained, his uncle had enlisted and, “was shot down and killed in the Pacific.”

Shirley's family had a tradition of military service going back to the American Revolution.

Two of his ancestors fought at Breed's Hill and Bunker Hill in Boston. Another ancestor “was with Washington all the way from 1775 to 1783. He was at Valley Forge, he contracted small pox there and lost an eye.”

That same great-grandfather fought at Monmouth, Boston, and Trenton. “He was in a number of battles under Washington's command. He was just a militiaman, one of the regular army from Connecticut. I don't think he achieved any rank.”

While his family members served in the military, Shirley said, “I wanted to do something from the standpoint of the civilians and how they were affected by the events of December 7.”


Deep and broad research
To research the material that ended up in the book, Shirley explained he “cast as wide a net as possible. We went to all the Roosevelt materials and uncovered documents that hadn't been reported on previously. We went through [Secretary of War] Henry Stimson's papers at Yale, we went through [Secretary of State] Cordell Hull's papers.”

Shirley and his research team also explored “Eleanor Roosevelt's papers and diaries, all the White House documents we could get our hands on, all the War Department” documents that were available.

“On top of all that,” he said, he looked at memos, diaries, and “thousands and thousands of newspaper articles” as well as “shortwave dispatches because at the time, CBS and NBC both had shortwave commercial broadcast stations and so the transcripts of those shortwave broadcasts” are archived.

Newspapers were a particularly rich source of information.

“There were some reporters and columnists who were just terrific and I like to use their material. It's interesting that there probably wasn't a newspaper reporter in 1941 who wasn't an excellent writer. They were all very good writers.”

In 1941, there were about 2,000 daily newspapers across the country, Shirley explained, compared to about 500 today. New York City had nearly 20 daily newspapers, he said, “including ethnic papers, [like] Polish papers. Washington, I think, had seven daily newspapers at the time.”


'Great man theory'
What surprised Shirley in the course of his research was “coming to the conclusion that Franklin Roosevelt was a better man than I thought he was. I am a political conservative, but I am also a historian and I have to look at things objectively.”

The New Deal, he asserted, “in terms from the standpoint of turning the economy around, was a failure [but] it did help the morale of the American people, there's no doubt about that.”

There is also no doubt, he added that, “without Winston Churchill [and] without Franklin Roosevelt, Adolph Hitler and the empire of Japan would have ruled the known world.

Churchill and Roosevelt, he concluded, “really are part of what Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish historian, postulated as the great man theory of history, and these truly were great men.”

An earlier version of this interview appeared on Examiner.com, and see my comments on December 1941 on Where Are the Copy Editors?.

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Author Interview: Arthur Herman on 'Freedom's Forge'

Charlottesville-based historian Arthur Herman is the author of six books, including the Pulitzer-Prize finalist Gandhi & Churchill and the New York Times best-seller How the Scots Invented the Modern World.

Herman’s latest book is Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II.

Earlier this summer, which by coincidence was on the 68th anniversary of the D-Day landings at Normandy, I met Herman at the Boar’s Head Inn to talk about the book, which he sums up as a story about “releasing the innate productive power of American business.”

Herman pointed out there were two business enterprises in Charlottesville that manufactured products that were critical to the American war effort.


Charlottesville’s war effort
One was Ix Mills, located where the Frank Ix building still stands south of downtown.

During the war, he said, Ix Mills “moved from making commercial textiles to making parachute cloth. They really became the center of the parachute cloth making for the Second World War.”

The soldiers “who jumped on D-Day” as portrayed in Stephen Spielberg’s film, Saving Private Ryan, as well as the “airmen who had to jump out over Germany and at sea during the Second World War were using Charlottesville-produced parachutes.”

Historian Arthur Herman

The other Charlottesville company that Herman discovered during his research was Southern Welding, which “made various kinds of iron piping and steel tubing. During the war, they shifted to making the steel tubing for aircraft, to contain all the electric lines and so on in B-24s and B-25s. What they also did, and their real breakthrough, is they developed the parts for arrester gear on navy aircraft carriers.”

The arrester gear allowed planes to land on the carriers without being pulled apart by a braking mechanism.

“Southern Welding, here in Charlottesville, developed the parts and manufactured the parts that went on aircraft carriers all across the Pacific. In fact, at one point, Charlottesville-made arrester gear and tailhook gear was on 43 separate aircraft carriers during the Second World War.”


Remembering D-Day
When Herman thinks about D-Day, in particular, he focuses on two things.

“First of all,” he explained, D-Day was about more than amassing military personnel “but also amassing a vast industrial effort.”

Two thirds of the landing craft and sea-going vessels used on D-Day were produced in American factories, he said, and “it’s a tribute not just to the bravery of our armed forces but also to the huge logistical possibilities that American industry could generate a landing and an enterprise of the sort that the world had never seen.”

The second thing about D-Day that comes to Herman’s mind is that “the very first Americans to get news that the landings were successful were the people working the night shifts in the factories on the East Coast.”

At the Bethlehem Shipyard in Sparrow’s Point in Baltimore, he recalled, “work stopped and everybody sank to their knees and said the Lord’s Prayer as they got the news.”

That, he said, is “really fitting, that the people who produced the tools that made that victory possible were the very first to learn that what they had done, and what they had contributed to, had been a success.”

Stated succinctly, the theme of Freedom’s Forge, is that the growth of industry during World War II was “far from being a kind of Washington, D.C.[-based], bureaucrat-driven production effort” and that, he explained, “what [it] really was about was releasing the innate productive power of American business.”

More widely, he said, the success of America’s wartime industrial production effort came “in spite of” government-imposed rationing and wage and price controls.

“The rationing that everybody remembers,” he pointed out, was the result of “government controls over the consumption of civilian goods.”


‘Minimal control’
For industrial goods needed by the military – airplanes, ships, weapons, and Jeeps – came about because, even before Pearl Harbor “the military learned it was best to let business and manufacturers handle it themselves,” and that it should be decentralized, Herman said.

“They learned that minimal control from Washington -- or even from the military services -- usually ended up getting products on time,” he explained, and “at a continually lower cost as well.”

That, he said, “was really the key ingredient in the whole wartime production effort,” the fact “that the manufacturers and producers found ways to constantly roll the costs down, so it was a huge boon not just for the American military, really giving us the tools to win World War II, but it was also a huge boon to American business and industry because they became leaner, more efficient operating organizations as a result of the wartime effort.”

The business executives and industrialists who are portrayed in Herman’s book – former General Motors president William Knudsen, road- and ship-builder (and health insurance pioneer) Henry Kaiser, Ford Motor Company’s Charles Sorensen, and others – are larger-than-life characters who seem to spring from the pages of an Ayn Rand novel, an assessment with which Herman agrees.


‘Creativity of the human mind’
“What Ayn Rand understood,” he said, “and one of the lessons that you get from her work, which is in some ways is reflected in this book, is that what the arsenal of democracy was really all about wasn’t ships and tanks and planes, any more than national wealth or an economy is about oil wells and gold mines and factories and industrial output or goods and services.”

Rather, he explained, “what it’s really about is creativity. It’s about the creativity of the human mind. It’s about vision. It’s about leadership and problem-solving.”

Throughout its history, he noted, American business has “been really at the forefront of all of those aspects. That’s what drives American business. That’s what drives American civilization.”

What Herman “wanted to chronicle is just how this episode in our history, a crucial moment in world history as well as for the United States, really reflected all of those kinds of powerful virtues that someone like Ayn Rand realized were at work in a free market economy.”

Those characteristics, he said, are “clearly on show in people like Bill Knudsen, the man [whom] Roosevelt brought to construct a system by which you could get this bottoms-up, free-market, private-sector drive to production,” as well as “the other characters [readers will] meet in the book.”

Herman’s previous books, he explained, were “on topics as various as how the Scots invented the modern world and the contribution of the Scottish enlightenment to modern civilization.”

He also wrote a book on the British navy, called To Rule the Waves. Herman explained that “Freedom’s Forge is in some ways an outgrowth” of the research on that earlier book, as he “became more and more interested in the relationship between economics and modern warfare and the links between those two things.”

‘Innate productive power’
What Freedom’s Forge does, he said, is “turn the whole story of how the United States got ready for World War II on its head.” The book argues that, “far from being a kind of Washington, D.C., [led], bureaucrat-driven production effort, what this really was about was releasing the innate productive power of American business.”

Herman’s thesis seems counterintuitive to people whose idea of economics during the Second World War is limited to rationing of sugar, butter, gasoline, and automobile tires.

The war production effort, Herman asserts, succeeded “in spite of” that kind of centralized control, noting that “the rationing that everybody who lived through that period remembers” was about “government controls over the consumption of civilian goods.”

The war production effort began even before Pearl Harbor, “starting in the summer of 1940,” Herman said, and “what the military learned was it was best to let business and manufacturers handle it themselves.”

The War Department, he explained, and President Roosevelt himself “learned that minimal control from Washington or even from the military services usually ended up getting products on time -- getting the tanks and planes and ships built -- at a continually lower cost as well”

The “key ingredient” of wartime production, Herman said, “is that the manufacturers and producers found ways to constantly roll the costs down, so it was a huge boon not just for the American military, giving us the tools to win World War II, but it was also a huge boon to American business and industry because they became leaner, more efficient operating organizations as a result of the wartime effort.”

Quirky and surprising
While doing his research, Herman came across a few quirky stories and surprising facts.

“One that will completely surprise people when they read the book,” he said, “because it’s so at variance from our usual textbook image” that the United States was caught off-guard by the Pearl Harbor attack.

In fact, “the war production effort was well underway well before Pearl Harbor,” Herman pointed out.

“As I explain in the book, it really began in the summer of 1940 when Roosevelt realized war is going to come” and that he had to get the country ready for it,” so FDR called “Bill Knudsen, president of General Motors, and says, how do I do it?”

With the system that Knudsen put in place, with Roosevelt’s blessing, Herman continued, “far from being caught off guard, we had gone from a standing start to a wartime production that was fast approaching that of Hitler’s Germany. A lot of people don’t realize that but this is in fact what American industry could do.”

There was a second surprise that Herman discovered.

“The most interesting statistic, stunning statistic that came out of my research was that in 1942, as this war production effort is going on, the number of Americans killed or injured in war-related industries surpassed the number of Americans in uniform killed and wounded in action in the war by a factor of 20 to 1,” he said.

The civilian sector of “what we call the Greatest Generation were [not] just sitting at home or just comfortably handling jobs while people in uniform were out risking their lives at sea and on land and in the air,” he said.

To the contrary, he explained, war production was “incredibly dangerous work. It involved enormous sacrifice from lots of people, including business executives. One hundred eighty-nine General Motors senior executives died on the job during the war.”

Summing up, Herman said that what is “really the thesis of the book” is that “this was a huge effort [that] was made possible by the productive forces that are part of a free-market American economy,” and not by any centralized planning devised in the Pentagon or the Washington bureaucracy.

The complete interview with Arthur Herman, author of Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II, is available as a podcast on Bearing Drift radio’s “The Score.”

This article is based on three separately published excerpts from the interview, which appeared on Examiner.com on June 6, July 1, and September 2, 2012.

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What Was Christmas Like in 1941? A Book Review

Pearl Harbor Christmas: A World at War, December 1941, by Stanley Weintraub. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, November 1, 2011. 224 pp., $24.00.

“Pearl Harbor Christmas” may sound like the title of a 1960s-era TV holiday spectacular set in Hawaii, in which Bing Crosby had sung a duet of “Mele Kalikimaka” with Rosemary Clooney.

It’s not.

It is actually a tightly-packed but readable account of the “12 days of Christmas” beginning two weeks after the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on the U.S. Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor (Sunday, December 21 to Thursday, January 1). It begins with the arrival of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Washington for talks with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and ends with the ceremonial signing of the “Joint Declaration of War Aims” by representatives of the nations allied against the Axis Powers.

In between, author Stanley Weintraub takes his readers on a day-by-day (sometimes hour-by-hour) account of the political, diplomatic, and military events of that crucial week and a half. He circles the globe, drawing on public documents, letters, and diaries from not just the United States and Britain but also from the Philippines, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaya, Singapore, Australia, France, North Africa, the Soviet Union, Germany, and Japan.

I picked up Pearl Harbor Christmas by chance at a local bookstore and bought it on a whim, thinking that it primarily would focus on the home front in the weeks following the Pearl Harbor attack and how Americans adjusted their holiday celebrations to the new realities of having been thrust into war.

The book has some of that, and Weintraub is able to draw an adequate picture of what the Christmas season of 1941 was like.

Wartime black-out rules had not yet dimmed Christmas lights, and Christmas trees themselves, Wientraub says, “were plentiful, seldom priced at more than a dollar or two.” Rockefeller Center presented its annual Christmas show, featuring the Rockettes, and people were still reading comic strips and going to the movies.

“The hit book for Christmas giving,” he writes in a prelude, “at a hefty $2.50, was Edna Ferber’s Reconstruction-era romance Saratoga Trunk. For the same price, war turned up distantly yet bombastically in a two-disc set of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, performed by Artur Rodzinski and the Cleveland Orchestra.”

Weintraub goes on to list the prices of crates of citrus fruits (“$2.79 at Bloomingdales”) and new cars (“soon to be unobtainable”) for $900. Silk stockings were $1.25 a pair, and nylon stockings – which would also quickly disappear as the fabric was needed for parachutes – were $1.65.

In a clever, parenthetical turn of phrase, he writes about upscale clothing shops:

“Hattie Carnegie’s designer dresses began at $15. The upscale Rogers Peet menswear store offered suits and topcoats from a steep $38. (At recruiting stations nationwide, the army was offering smart khaki garb at no cost whatever to enlistees.)”

The book, however, is mostly about politics, not domestic life.  And the politics and diplomacy that are the focus of Weintraub's research are fascinating in themselves.

Churchill’s extended visit to Washington included bibulous dinners at the White House, a joint press conference with FDR, two visits to local churches (on Christmas and New Year’s Day), a speech to a joint session of Congress, a side-trip to Ottawa to address the Canadian parliament, and the British Prime Minister’s only shared public appearance with the American President, at the annual lighting of the White House Christmas tree.

The account of the Christmas Eve speeches is one of several sections of the book that could have used a better editor’s eye, because Weintraub’s writing is redundant on two facing pages.

On page 80, Weintraub writes that Churchill began his speech with the phrase “This is a strange Christmas Eve,” and then quotes extensively from his remarks, including a passage about “war, raging and soaring over all the lands and seas, creeping nearer to our hearts and our homes.”

Three paragraphs later, on page 81, Weintraub repeats the passage:

“It was, [Churchill] conceded, ‘a strange Christmas eve,’ with war ‘raging and roaring over all the lands and seas, creeping nearer to our hearts and homes.’”

This is not an isolated incident of sloppy editing.

In a description of how actor Robert Montgomery – by December 1941 an officer in Naval Intelligence assigned to the White House – set up a map room for the President’s use, Weintraub writes on pages 75-76:

“Space was limited; toilets and sinks were removed from a ladies’ cloakroom in the basement, as Montgomery superintended the conversion of a ladies cloakroom in the basement into a secure information center...”

Similar repetitiveness is found on page 92 (“Rarely seen at religious services at home, Churchill accompanied the President to Foundry Methodist Church…”) and 94 (“Churchill – not a churchgoer at home…”).

Still, these errors, while distracting, do not significantly mar the flow of the story that Weintraub tells, and Pearl Harbor Christmas is a real page-turner as the narration flies from place to place, sometimes describing high politics and sometimes describing the hardscrabble efforts at survival of seamen and grunts.

The book reveals how, simultaneously, the United States was caught unawares by the Japanese attacks in the Pacific, leading to the quick fall of the Philippines under what Weintraub seems to characterize as arrogant and incompetent military leadership of General Douglas MacArthur – but that it was also able to turn on a dime and, within weeks, ramp up its military and industrial operations to meet the needs of facing down hostile enemies in both Europe and the Pacific.

The 12 days of Christmas in 1941 included delicate negotiations about how the war would be pursued. As a direct result of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the American people were angry and eager to take the war into the Pacific and strike back at the Japanese immediately. Churchill and Roosevelt, however, recognized that the greater threat came from Hitler’s Germany and that the initial focus of the war should be in Europe. Japan would have to wait.

In the course of events, the war was fought on both fronts, but the defeat of Hitler came first, with Japan to fall several months later.

What’s remarkable to see, in that regard, is the predictions made by military and political leaders of that time about how long it would take to bring the war to an end. Not precisely correct, Churchill thought that a frontal invasion of the European continent would occur sometime in 1943, with the war to end by 1944. He was off by a year but, on the general shape the war would take, he was eerily prescient.

The intersection of wartime and Christmastime is a particular focus of Stanley Weintraub's prolific work. He is also the author of Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce (2002); 11 Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944 (2007); and General Sherman's Christmas: Savannah, 1864 (2009); as well as General Washington's Christmas Farewell: A Mount Vernon Homecoming, 1783 (2007).  Could Christmas in Kandahar be next?  (There is already a song by that name but, so far, no book.)

If one is primarily interested in social history (as I was, when I purchased this book), Pearl Harbor Christmas could turn out to disappoint, because it is primarily about political and military history. In my case, the initial disappointment ended quickly, because the story that Weintraub tells is compelling, with many revealing details about the first weeks of the Second World War that otherwise would be buried in archives and dusty memoirs.

Author Interview: Earl Dudley Chronicles a Life from Prisoner to Professor

Having had a childhood that virtually parallels the story of Steven Spielberg’s 1987 movie, Empire of the Sun, retired UVA law professor Earl C. Dudley, Jr., begins his memoir, An Interested Life, with the Japanese bombing of the Philippines that followed the attack on Pearl Harbor.

“My mother and I were injured in the first Japanese bombing of the Philippine Islands on December 8, 1941,” he told me in a recent interview.  “With my parents, I was interned in the Japanese internment camps for a little over three years in the Philippines, and we were rescued by a very dramatic operation of the 11th Airborne Division on February 23, 1945.”

Dudley was one of more than 30 local and regional writers at a “Meet the Author” book signing at the Holiday Inn in Charlottesville on November 19.


‘My parents were starving themselves’
“I was only 4 when the war was over,” Dudley explained, “so I have little independent memory of my own, but I have no memory of having had an unhappy childhood.  My life was sheltered.  My parents were starving themselves to feed me.”

He recalled that his father, “who was about 6 feet tall and normally weighed about 175 or 180 pounds, weighed about 120 pounds when the war was over.  It was an experience for the adults that involved a tremendous amount of deprivation and unpleasantness.”

Yet, he remembers that, “as a child, I had the full attention of my parents.  They were prisoners and so they focused their attention on me and they starved themselves to feed me. So I don’t think I had an unhappy childhood.”

After spending one’s earliest years in a prisoner of war camp, anything after that must pale in comparison.  Yet Dudley’s life was peppered with poignant moments.

John F. Kennedy Assassination
In the early 1960s, he was working as a journalist for UPI in New York.  As it happens, he was on the editor's desk when President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963.

He writes in his memoir about that day:

“The news of the assassination hit me, as it did almost everyone, like a punch to the solar plexus.  But I had no time to grieve.  I was running an international news wire with the biggest story in many years.  Given the magnitude and pace of events, there was no time for a transition to a new editor, so I remained in the [editor’s] slot for most of the next shift as well….  I simply operated on instinct and somehow made it through the crisis without panicking.”

End of segregation
Dudley grew up in the South during the last years of enforced segregation.  He was in the ninth grade in Northern Virginia, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” schools were inherently unequal and, consequently, unconstitutional in the case of Brown v. Board of Education.

“I was the only kid that I ever found at my Herndon High School in 1954 whose parents told him the Supreme Court got it right,” he said.

Working for civil rights, he continued, “was always a priority of mine.  I organized a demonstration at the White House in the spring of 1960 in support of the sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, and then in later years, I did a fair amount of pro bono work for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights in Washington.”

Studying at the University of Virginia Law School drew Dudley to Charlottesville and, after graduating, he clerked for Chief Justice Earl Warren during the Supreme Court’s 1967-68 term.

Police pat-downs
Dudley clerked during the year the Court decided Terry v. Ohio, a case that may have relevance in the current controversy about Transportation Security Administration searches at U.S. airports.

Dudley said that case was probably the best-known of that Supreme Court term, adding that he worked on it, explaining that it “dealt with the question of police pat-downs on the street, with less than probable cause to arrest. It was very controversial case at the time and has spawned a huge, whole jurisprudence of its own.”

After two decades working for various Washington law firms, Dudley returned to Charlottesville to teach.

His classes included “mostly litigation-related courses, because that’s what I had done in practice.  I taught evidence, civil procedure, criminal procedure, criminal law, constitutional law, and trial advocacy.”

Dudley retired from teaching in 2008, and now enjoys quietude and travel with his wife of more than 50 years, Louise, and his family, seven decades after a tumultuous beginning to what he calls “an interested life.”

(This article originally appeared in slightly different form on Examiner.com on Sunday, November 21, 2010.)

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